By Ashwaq Masoodi, Kashmiri Fulbright Alumna
When I told a friend I was going to Pakistan, he laughed & said “Why Pakistan?” I told him I was going to attend a conference on women empowerment & that happens to be my field of interest. He laughed again and said, “So now Pakistan wants women empowerment? That sounds a little odd.” He also asked me to be careful and not get killed or kidnapped somewhere.
All these statements reminded me of how most of my friends in Delhi talk about Kashmir. Is it safe to go there? Does every Kashmiri hate Indians? Do Kashmiris identify themselves as Indians? Somehow because of the media, we create an image of a place in a way which is not necessarily what it is or even close to what it is.
Growing up in the Indian side of Kashmir, for me the idea of Pakistan was not just as a stake holder in the longstanding K-issue. It is a country which is referred as Jaa-e-Pak (Jaa=place in Persian, Pak= pure, sacred) by my people.
So, here I was listening to scary stories about agents following everyone holding an Indian passport and the pain of visiting police stations every day. I was very excited to go to Pakistan – because of the conference, because I wanted to buy pretty lawn suits and because it was Pakistan after all. Even though I kept waiting for the day I’d land there, inside my head I had a pile of worries stacking more and more as the day of departure got closer. Everyone I spoke with had a piece of advice (mostly things that scared me).
Finally, on March 6, I landed in Islamabad around 10:00 am. At the immigration, a fellow journalist and I went through the normal drill – signing one form after the other and answering a few questions. A woman at the immigration counter (in a lighter tone) said, “You know Indians are a little suspicious…so it takes time.” But we realized it was just a friendly banter. By 11:30 we stepped into the real Islamabad. It looked no different from India, (was definitely cleaner) – the people didn’t look any different (women were definitely prettier), hardly any stray dogs roamed around and there were no traffic snarls. It looked very peaceful and reminded me of Washington DC somehow – broad, straight roads, clean streets, tall trees on either side of the roads.
When we reached the hotel, it was time for the Friday prayers. So naturally the shops, restaurants were shut. A fast food place One Potato Two Potatoes was perhaps the only place open. The 3000 Pakistani rupees that I had converted in India, I was told, were no longer valid in Pakistan (BTW it was really difficult to get Indian rupees converted to the Pakistani currency). The guy at the restaurant declined to take it.
When my fellow journalist told him I was from Kashmir on the Indian side, he smiled. Very politely, he took the note back and said, “Get the others converted in a state bank. These don’t work anymore.” He also gave away free cheese dips. After that, free chappal (or chappli) kebabs, concessions at shopping, out of the world hospitability and extra smiles every time I mentioned where I am from, happened.
It was my first visit to Pakistan. I was a part of a group of 300 people from six countries who had come together for the International Women’s Empowerment Conference ‘Make It Happen’, organized by Pakistan US Alumni Network and the US Embassy in Islamabad. The hall was full of people from different fields of life, from different countries and with extremely different lived experiences. But there was one thing I couldn’t not notice, everyone had a story waiting to be heard and written.
Be it the photojournalist from Quetta who at 25 has already received threat calls from Taliban, or the first Pakistani woman and the youngest Muslim woman in the world to climb Mount Everest, or the man leading the Pakistan Disability Movement. Or the female drama writers who make it a point to at least empower women on screen and try and break stereotypical roles women are expected to play in the male dominated societies. Everyone I spoke with, not just the six main speakers had a story.
Just the fact that we were all patiently listening to each other (without pulling each other’s hair as we in media news hour make it seem like) made me realize the importance of these informal conversations between common people.
The conflict resolution workshop that I attended as part of the conference stressed on the need to understand and empathize with “the other” and more importantly the need to have a dialogue. Not just India and Pakistan, I think it is extremely important for us to make our perceptions based on our lived experiences, and not heresy.
The conference was a means to bring people to share their stories of struggle towards empowerment, but what it really achieved was not just making us think of every story we heard as OUR own story, but breaking the myths, built-in stereotypes and predispositions about places and people that we all had.
(Ashwaq Masoodi is a journalist in a newspaper in New Delhi and a Fulbright alumnus)
